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Reflecting on 1,000 columns over 20 years: the predictions that came true

By:   []

Date: 2021-09

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the first column I wrote for openDemocracy, a few days after the 9/11 attacks and before the start of the interminable ‘War on Terror’. It is also the 1,000th column in the series and so a fitting opportunity to reflect on how it came about, and how the analysis presented back then stands up 20 years later.

Like many peace researchers in the immediate post-Cold War years of the early 1990s, my colleagues and I at the University of Bradford were trying to work out how trends in international insecurity were evolving. In an early contribution, Malcolm Dando and I wrote the book, ‘A Violent Peace’, published in 1992, which argued that state-on-state conflict might be overshadowed by the impact of global trends, especially environmental limits to growth.

Two years later, I co-edited, along with Kath and Geoff Tansey, another book, ‘A World Divided’, recently republished by Routledge, which focused more on how the global system was not only subject to limits to growth but was based on an economic model causing more marginalisation.

Later in the decade, I also wrote about how conventional approaches to security were misguided, with little interest in conflicts arising from an environmentally constrained and economically divided world. These conflicts, it was argued, could not be controlled by force, and the term ‘liddism’ was coined to explain attempts to keep the lid on dissent rather than turn down the heat. That led to my next book, ‘Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century’, published in 2000.

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It all started with 9/11

Around that time, the mediator and conflict resolution specialist, Gabrielle Rifkind, was working with Scilla Elworthy, founding director of the Oxford Research Group, on approaches to conflict resolution. Rifkind, who now runs the conflict resolution organisation, Oxford Process, liked the term ‘liddism’ and decided to run occasional “liddite conversations” at her London home, bringing together academics, activists and media people to discuss this and related themes.

In the first of these, held a couple of months before 9/11, Scilla and I presented an analysis of world security trends from the ‘Losing Control’ perspective to an interested, if somewhat sceptical, group that included the founding editor-in-chief of openDemocracy, Anthony Barnett, who was then engaged in setting up the publication.

openDemocracy started publishing at the beginning of September 2001, and immediately attracted attention. When 9/11 happened, Barnett got in touch with me and suggested I write an article about the attacks and what might happen next. I did so, then followed it up the week after with another, and yet another a week later, and so on until the thousandth today.

The columns have concentrated mainly on the security dimension and the overall causes of war, not least because of openDemocracy’s remarkable range of writers, who have so many different global perspectives. The columns have also covered climate breakdown and the impact of socio-economic marginalisation, with the underlying thinking being that the dominant causes of global insecurity in the early decades of the 21st century would be the widening socio-economic divide, global marginalisation and environmental limits to growth.

Of all the columns, three stick in my mind the most. That very first one, ‘Afghanistan: the problem with military action’, went against most conventional thinking after 9/11 by arguing strongly against going to war with al-Qaida and the Taliban, warning of an interminable conflict. That seemed to get it wrong at the time, as the Bush administration terminated the Taliban regime in Kabul and dispersed al-Qaida across South Asia and beyond in a matter of weeks.
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